Nigeria’s Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Heineken Lokpobiri, has called for greater investment in the country’s mainstream oil sector, insisting that Nigeria holds the key to Africa’s energy future.
Delivering his keynote address at the 2025 Africa Energy Week (AEW), Lokpobiri said refining and investing in Nigeria guarantees a market that goes beyond the country’s borders.
“If you refine products in Nigeria, if you invest in the mainstream, you certainly will have a market that will service not only Nigeria with a consumption of 50 million litres per day, not to talk of the diesel that is consumed, the NAFTA, the by-products that are needed in Nigeria, but also, the entire West African nation up to Central Africa Republic,” the minister said.
He noted that the removal of fuel subsidies was necessary to attract private sector participation. According to him, “when we remove subsidy from Nigeria to trigger private sector investment, Nigeria didn’t protest as much as our neighbours who protested.”
Lokpobiri argued that the subsidy regime was unsustainable and benefited neighbouring countries more than Nigerians. “How can we remove a subsidy that was bleeding Nigeria? And the protest was in neighbouring countries, not in Nigeria. That is evidence of the fact that whatever we’re doing was basically subsidising the entire West African sub-region,” he explained.
Reiterating Nigeria’s strategic importance, he said, “The point is that Nigeria is the gateway to the West African market. And by extension, we want Nigeria to be the gateway to the entire African market.”
